A Look at the Institution of Slavery

Slavery, also called “involuntary servitude”, is a topic that today’s culture finds odious. The institution of slavery has existed for thousands of years. For over a century, slavery has been outlawed all over the world. Yes, it still exists in clandestine cases, with the number of slaves being a tiny percent of the population, in many places, but it is not considered acceptable in any national society. Not even in Islamic countries, although the Quran recommends making slaves of infidels.

How did slavery begin? In paleolithic cultures, each society was a family group, and families work together voluntarily. In the Neolithic, societies became larger, and competition for territory and resources caused the development of warfare. If our army manages to surround a smaller force of the enemy, what should we do?

A. Should we accept their surrender and send them home? Next month they would be attacking us again.

B. Should we keep swinging our swords until they are all dead? They will fight desperately and kill some of us, and we will end up with a bunch of useless cadavers.

C. Should we accept their surrender and put them in POW camps? We will have to expend our resources to guard and feed them for a long time.

D. Should we accept their surrender and make them slaves? At least we will get some useful labor out of them, including some menial labor that we would prefer not to have to do for ourselves. This seems like the best answer for us, and better than the worst for them. Win-win? [ Reminds me of something my mother said: “I don’t want to get old, but I don’t like the alternative.” ]

Thus began the long history of slavery, an institution that existed in almost every continent. Not Australia—its culture was paleolithic. Not Antarctica—penguins never kept slaves.

The Bible tells us that the Hebrews were enslaved by the Egyptians. This was not the beginning of slavery, but the earliest well-known document.

The Romans were very successful in their conquests, and brought home great numbers of slaves. So many that they feared that the slaves might revolt and conquer Rome. Google “Spartacus”.

In the middle ages, slavery was quite normal in Europe. Also in China, and, no doubt, other places not so well known.

As Europe came out of the Dark Ages, Europeans began to explore the world. Islam had blocked the Silk Road to China, providing a motive to seek another way to the Far East.

Portuguese explorers sailed around Africa and found a maritime route to the Far East, setting up outpost colonies
in Africa at Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, and Mozambique. Onward at Goa, in India, Moluccas in Indonesia, and Macao, in China. On the west coast of Africa, they captured natives and took them home as slaves. Soon, other European nations joined into this lucrative business. Slaves from Africa were sold into Portuguese, Spanish and English colonies in America.

In the Christian countries of Europe there was doubt from the very beginning of the correctness of this slave trade. These were not prisoners of war who had to be enslaved or executed to prevent them from coming back to make war again. The violation of their rights was rather obviously egregious. To justify or rationalize the slave trade, it was pointed out that to remove these pagans in their homes in West Africa and take them where they would learn to be Christians meant saving them from the eternal fires of hell, and thus was a good deed. What did not occur to the Europeans was that once they became Christians they should be freed, or sent back to Africa to convert other pagans.

In America the Spanish often made slaves of the more civilized natives, such as the Aztecs. The English tried to do this in their colonies in North America, but the idea did not work out well. The North American Indians were accustomed to living in the great forests that spread from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River. A slave from these peoples had only to run off into the woods and go home. An African slave had no such option; the Atlantic Ocean was too wide to swim across, even if here were no sharks.

The history of slavery in the United States is well-known. English colonists bought slaves to work on farms raising tobacco and other crops. Many were made house servants or concubines. Then Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, and cotton became the biggest cash crop, a labor-intensive crop that made slaves very valuable.

When the US became independent and the Constitution was written in the 1780’s, a great many Americans considered slavery to be wrong and unjust, including some of the founders of the Republic. However, it was expected that England would try to reconquer its lost colonies, and it was necessary that the states be united to defend against the greatest military power on earth. Because the southern states, whose economies depended heavily on slaves to raise cotton and tobacco, would be unlikely to join the new union if the Constitution outlawed slavery, the authors of the constitution left the issue of slavery in the hands of each individual state. In 1812 came England’s attempt at reconquest, showing that the decision to avoid disunion was indeed necessary at that time. History has shown that in the longer run, keeping slavery was a bad idea.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, and of much of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson, considered slavery an abomination. Yet he had hundreds of slaves, which he inherited. At least I can admire his principles; he was willing to ban slavery in the constitution even though it would have cost him his work force.

The southern colonies were an advantageous place for slavery at that time. Slaves could not run away to their homes because there was an ocean in the way. They could not run off and pretend to free men, because their skin color would quickly give them away.

As time went on, the ideal decayed.

Some states prohibited teaching a slave to read. It would be inconvenient to have slaves reading things like the Declaration of Independence, with its subversive messages like “…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty…”. But a slave who can’t read instructions, or write a note, is less useful than one who can. Today our society has become so technical that nobody wants an illiterate worker.

As African black slaves and European white free peoples mixed, it was inevitable that children of mixed race should be born. Further, some slave-owners would free a slave on occasion. In French and Spanish colonies, a great many racial categories were invented for people with different proportions of mixtures. Google “quadroon”, “octoroon”, “mulatto”, “griffe”, “sacatra”, “Meamelouc”, “Quarteron”, and “Sangmele”. There are many more such invented categories, and if you want to really complicate things try including races other than Black and White in the mix.

In the USA, the categories were simpler: people of “pure” European descent were “white” and people of mixed African and European descent were “negroes”. This system occurred because, when a white slave-owner used a black slave as a concubine, he would want any offspring to be considered a negro and thus a new slave. As time went on, there were mixes of half black, one quarter black, one eighth black, 1/16 black, 1/32 black, and many other proportions in between. All of these were called negroes, even if they looked white. For an example of the absurdities to which this system could lead, read The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain.

Laws were passed to prevent the mixing of the races. These were about as successful as laws prohibiting the use of addictive drugs such as alcohol, heroin, and marijuana.

Slavery started as an alternative to Death. Nobody wants to be a slave, but it usually better than being dead. A slave is under the rule of another person, and that person may be kind or evil, but even if kind, slaves usually prefer to be free. Even if the slave-owner be kind, he will eventually die and the slave will be sold to or inherited by another person whom the slave is not allowed to choose. Or the kind owner may go bankrupt, and lose his property to somebody else.

If a slave has a family, all members of the family can be sold off and just go out of his life.

Most all of us want to move up in the world, but a slave has almost no upward mobility. With very few exceptions. In America we have Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas, who became free and then famous. In China, a slave girl moved up to be Empress. But these are one in a million cases.

Are there any advantages to being a slave? Quite few. A slave is valuable property, and his master will see that he has adequate food, clothing, housing, and even medical care, just as he would try to take good care of a valuable horse or mule. There have been cases in history where a parent would sell a child into slavery when poverty promised starvation—the child would be fed and cared for, and the money would feed the rest of the family.

J. Frank Dobie wrote a short story that illustrates one advantage of being a slave. A young man came to Texas, coming ashore in Galveston with half a dollar in his pocket, and went to look for work. His first job was doing odd jobs for a rancher for fifty cents a day. The rancher also had a slave, about the same age as the new white employee. One day the rancher had the slave breaking horses, and the rancher’s wife came to see. A horse bucked off the slave, who dusted himself off and got back on. The rancher’s wife called him aside and said, “You let that white boy break them horses. That black boy will get his neck broke, and that’s a seven hunderd dollar nigger!” A slave is valuable and should be cared for.

After the Black slaves became free with the 13th amendment in 1865, the tension left from slavery and the civil war did not go away.

George Washington advised against “permanent alliances”.
Thomas Jefferson reiterated with his advice to avoid “entangling alliances”. The Militia, a force of civilian soldiers who could come out when the community needed to be defended, began in colonial times and was continued by Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and many others who did not want our freedom to depend only on a professional army. The idea of the original militia was that each citizen should be armed, keep his weapon at home, and ready to be called out to defend our nation, communities, and liberty. The rule became that every man should own a rifle, and be trained to be a soldier if needed. In some states, a man too poor to buy a rifle would be given one by the state.

This militia system, plus the avoidance of entangling alliances, was copied by one European nation. It has kept Switzerland free, independent, and neutral for centuries.

In the decades after the Civil War, the militias in the USA were disbanded. Today we have the National Guard, but these men do not keep their weapons at home; the government does not trust them as they did the militiamen. Why the change? Now that the slaves were free and full citizens, many found too scary the idea of “arming all those niggers”.

As time goes on, the percentage of the population that is mixed race increases. The policy of considering any person having even one ancestor from Africa a Negro means that over time the African-Americans must become a majority. From a white person’s point of view, the prospect of blacks becoming a majority may not be attractive. Organizations like “Planned Parenthood” were invented to try to reduce the birth rate among blacks.

It may well be said that all the racial strife, and accompanying nonsense, in our society today is an echo of the system of slavery in our past.